Following is a transcript (very slightly edited for ease of reading) about growing up on Ocracoke Island from an interview with Ellen Marie Fulcher Cloud (1940-2016). Ellen Marie, who loved Ocracoke and collected much island history, was interviewed March 30, 2016, by Barbara Garrity-Blake for Carolina Coastal Voices, an oral history project of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, NC. (https://youtu.be/69RL9wSnTvw?si=T2tiJNpsOs0egPdJ) This interview is shared with permission of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center.
And we’d have people ask us, “well, what do you do here,” and I said, “well, what do you do where you are? You can’t do the things that we do.” ….. It was like there were no boundaries, because your parents didn’t have to worry about you leaving…..you know, you couldn’t go anywhere, and if you did anything wrong, if the neighbor or whoever was around and saw you, she’d spank you and then tell your mother, and you’d get another one…that’s just the way it was. Nowadays you couldn’t do that…so you didn’t do anything wrong…..It was nothing to be down at the store…and kids would be swimming and they’d grab you and throw you off the end of the dock — if you just put on clean clothes — and….overboard you’d go!
And we’d go down at night and swim across the creek and back at night to watch the phosphorous in the water. It’s beautiful. We’d go on the beach and go swimming. We’d go steal somebody’s watermelons and go on the beach and have a watermelon party. In the wintertime we’d steal somebody’s chicken and then stew it, and they [the neighbors] would put up with it. Wallace Spencer was one. By the time we wanted something to do (“Well, let’s go get us a chicken!”), we’d stew it and play some games …. So, we went to Wallace’s and we’d get that chicken, and, of course, he’d start hollering and we’d run and at that time there was that tall grass, the sea oats and everything, out behind his house, and he’d come out there hollering in the kitchen and we lay there and then we’d laugh, with the chicken, holding him [the chicken] hollering. We’d go to the house and the boys would kill it and dress it and would stew it.
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Following is an essay written by Walter T. Howard, Jr. (b. 1944), “Tales from Paddy’s Hollow: The Tale of the “Stewed Chickens”
When I was a small lad living on Ocracoke Island, nothing seemed to be more boring than spending the evenings listening to the wind coursing through the branches of the old gnarled oak trees that dominated the local landscape. The excitement of summer was rapidly giving way to autumn and the cold winter months that followed. Now, to most kids my age winter’s approach meant less fun and more school work. As for me, I looked forward to the changing season with great joy. On those cool autumn eves my dad would call to me, saying, “Buddy Beaver,” let’s go up to Paddy’s Hollow*. This call always brought me running. A trip up to the Hollow meant going to the most memorable place I have ever visited. Leaving home for the trip up to the Hollow filled me with the hope of hearing tall tales.
The evenings would always begin with the old-timers drinking a few glasses of “meal wine” and telling funny stories. Meal wine was a locally brewed beverage. The county was a “dry” county, meaning that the sale of alcoholic beverages was not allowed. The inhabitants of Paddy’s Hollow had to resort to making their own. Meal wine was brewed by the rule of 5s. First, you would start with 5 gallons of water, then 5 pounds of corn meal was added. After this was stirred, 5 lbs of sugar was added along with 5 packets of yeast to start the fermentation. Now add 5 boxes of sun-dried raisins to give the brew a nice flavor. Once the fermentation started, it was allowed to “boil” for 5 days. On the 5th day the brewer would return to check the process. Now, if he found 5 drunk rats swimming in the vat he picked them up and wrung them out into the mixture. This way he lost none of the flavor. OK, OK, I’m just kidding about the rats.
After the meal wine finished “boiling,” it was then strained through a piece of cheese cloth to remove the raisins and the sediment. Now it was ready for consumption by the brave souls of Paddy’s Hollow.
About two glasses of wine were enough to raise the spirits and loosen the tongues of some of the finest story tellers this side of Limerick Ireland. I will now try to retell as best I can the story of the “stewed chickens.”
It was true that one of the best brewers of meal wine was the breeder of some of the island’s finest chickens. One summer’s day after brewing a batch of wine he threw the raisins out into the backyard to feed the chickens. It wasn’t long before the chickens were as intoxicated as the merrymakers in the Hollow. As suppertime was near, the decision to cook a couple of chickens for dinner was made. You can now say that that was the first and probably the last time “stewed” chickens were served for dinner in Paddy’s Hollow.
This story will be forever recorded in my memory as I recall all of those wonderful trips I took up to Paddy’s Hollow over sixty years ago with my dad.
* The Ocracoke village area, roughly parallel to, and between, the Back Road & Howard Street, from about the intersection of Fig Tree Lane and Back Road, past the back yards of houses now facing Back Road, then turning on a foot path behind the Methodist Church & Howard Street cemeteries.
